X-MEN: DOFP Writer Talks About Originals' 'Final Goodbye' & Where They Might Show Up Next

By Chris Arrant, Editor May 26, 2014 09:02am ET

Still from X-Men: Days of Future Past

Still from X-Men: Days of Future Past

The release last week of X-Men: Days Of Future Past did much to secure a promising future for the X-Men movie franchise, but according to screenwriter Simon Kinberg the future has past for some of theoriginal cast who launched the franchise. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Kinberg said that he and his colleagues on the film wrote this story intending to be a "final goodbye" for cast seen in future scenes, originated from the original 2000 X-Men movie.

"We approached it as a final goodbye for the original actors," Kinberg told THR. "But to be totally candid, that's the way I approached X-Men: The Last Stand. If you talked to me in 2006 and said, "Do you think we'll ever see Patrick Stewart as Professor Xavier again? Do you think we'll see Ian and Halle and Ellen Page and Shawn Ashmore back on screen together?" I most likely would have said no, and certainly in the case of Patrick Stewart I would have said no way. There's some part of our brains that hopes we will see them again, but we wanted to tell a story that felt like it was a conclusion to their stories."

In an interview by The Daily Beast, Kinberg clarified and somewhat refuted this by saying that 2016's X-Men: Apocalypse will primarily feature X-Men: First Class generation of castmembers but "will certainly have some of the original cast involved, too."

One newly introduced character who will get more screentime coming up is Quicksilver, played by Evan Peters, whose action sequence in the Pentagon has been noted by several critics as being one of the stand-out moments of X-Men: Days of Future Past. But as Kinberg says, that scene wasn't in the original script -- and nor was Quicksilver at all.

"In my first draft of the script, that character was actually young Juggernaut. One of the first thingsBryan Singer said about the script was we needed a different character, because he felt like Juggernaut's powers had visually been fully explored in X3," Kinberg said. "Quicksilver was really Bryan's idea, and he had this very clear sense of the tone of the character, who he wanted to play the character and how we would shoot that kitchen scene."

Still from X-Men: Days of Future Past

Kinberg also touches upon the rumors that the X-Men franchise might crossover with the soon-to-be-relaunched Fantastic Four movie franchise. The screenwriter is writing both X-Men: Apocalypse and Fantastic Four, and says that the challenge is how to make the Fantastic Four "fantastic" if they're not the only superhumans in the universe.

"In the world of Marvel Studios and everything they're doing that we've been inspired by, anything is possible. I would say purely as a fan of comics and these film franchises, I would love to see it, but it has challenges," the screenwriter says. "The Fantastic Four live in a world where they are fantastic because they are the only people who have super powers. If they were to live in a world full of mutants, they would kind of just be four more mutants. In the X-Men movies, we have never acknowledged a public team of superheroes called the Fantastic Four who live in New York City, even though Charles' mansion is in Westchester, not so far form the city."